If we’re so here to redeem Iroh on his past wrongdoings, then why is a clearly traumatized Native elder considered just pure evil.
I feel that people are missing the point when they bring up how Hama was not redeemable because of the things she did.
To me, it’s more about how her character was written in general. It’s about how white men specifically wrote a native woman who experienced trauma and torture at the hands of her oppressors and then ended her story with her being captured again. We need to consider how that looks when native women have a history of being abused – and that what the Fire Nation did to the Water Tribe reflects too strongly with real life.
They gave her trauma and they made her hellbent on revenge to the point where she would not be redeemable. And it feels wrong that they would also push the line to make sure she can only be seen as a villain because, at her core, she wants retribution for the things that were done to her and her people.
It’s not wrong for her to want retribution. It’s not wrong that she used whatever means she could to get out of the Fire Nation’s hands. The Fire Nation had already taken everything from her – she doesn’t owe them patience or compassion.
And yes, the way she handled things was wrong but you also have to consider that this is just how they written her to be? They framed the entire fact of her developing blood bending as a horrible act that made her unhinged and crazy. The focus isn’t on her pain or what she and her people suffered, it was on how she went crazy and lashed out at people.
Maybe it’s just me but I was sad at the fact that we missed out on Katara being able to connect with someone from her tribe and for them to relate to each other’s pain. It would have been nice to have Hama, jaded and paranoid from being forced to live as a recluse in the Fire Nation, to begin to open up more when first meeting with Katara and the gang and realize she could heal from her pain and become more – she could pass on her skills and become a mentor. Grow her family and tribe.
When it comes to stories that revolve around the marginalized, I think it means so much more to have them on the path of healing and growth, especially if it is in spite of the pain they have been dealt with at the hands of their oppressors.
The fact that her blood bending as demonized has always bothered me, because it was the one tool she used against her oppressors. It was more demonized than fire benders, and the show collectively forgot just why it was made.
I had such bad feelings about it.
One of the things that irked me about Hama was that one of the major plot points of ATLA is that no kind of bending is inherently bad, and that it’s the intentions of the people who use it that matter.
Except for bloodbending. Bloodbending is always bad. ( b ._.)b
Yea uh I don’t think Hama deserved redemption. What happened to her is horrible and she has every right to be angry and embittered by it BUT her trauma doesn’t excuse the fact that she was kidnapping villagers that did nothing to her with her blood bending and keeping them in a cave to starve. Blood bending is demonized because its sole purpose is to hurt others, it doesn’t have any healing properties like water or fire
Tumblr users are full of people with a chronic inability to recognize how abusive they are because they feel any possible trauma gives them justification to be abusers, are y'all really surprised? Once again I tell you Netflix bringing it to the American side of things was a mistake.
This dumbass takashi still has a tumblr???
hama deserved a happy ending for creating/discovering a new form of bending that allowed her to survive. Should she have kidnapped innocent people- no, but who says all of them people were innocent. She lived to be a little old lady and escaped a literal genocide by bloodbending.
Did you just literally just excuse kidnapping???
“But who says a of them people were innocent?”
This line of thinking can be used to defend a mass shooter. Sure they killed a lot of people, but who is to say that all the victims were innocent? Maybe one or two were bad. So that apparently makes it okay.
But… The show doesn’t even treat all native inspired people like they treated Hama. So why can we not look at her in a light other than “racist white people”
For starters. The reason Iroh is redeemable while Hama was not is because Hama has no remorse for what she has done. Her anger is justified, her trauma is justified, but she let her hate grow and fester to hurt people who didn’t do anything to her. People she wanted to hurt merely because they existed. How can people miss that she is a mirror for characters in the show. It isn’t an exact mash up but Hama is someone who let her anger grow and fester and it isn’t totally her fault. She had no one to be there for her to help her grow like the rest of the cast who would otherwise fester.
I don’t even hate Hama. I don’t even think most viewers hate her. And show wise I believe the cast addresses the horror she experienced but they(Katara specifically since she fought her) all had the sense of Justice to know she had to be stopped.
Hama is a warning.
Hama exemplified rage and hatred gone unchecked. And unlike Iroh, her rage was born from her loss, from her strife. Iroh was a man who saw the evil in himself and spent every waking moment trying to snuff it out; Hama is a woman who used that evil as a tool, then when the fire was its hottest, added more fuel to keep it burning.
A parallel in a different but not dissimilar story is the famous “One Bad Day” monologue from the Killing Joke movie.
Joker was born from One Bad Day. So was Batman. Both exemplify great things we can become - great protectors, and great harbingers of doom. Hama and Iroh are another example, but with a touch more nuance.
AHHH you worded a point I wanted to make but struggled with. Iroh and Hama are like two sides of the same coin!
This is your brain on “everything is politics”.
Because rather than seeing a basic, universal story about how trauma can curdle into hate and hate distills into monstrous actions, these people try to excuse said monstrous actions because of the perceived political aspects to it.
This is why I think the “all art is political” argument is bullshit.
Hm. I think a better “two sides of the same coin” thing would be Azula and Iroh. The tragedy that Iroh and Hama suffered are just way too different. Iroh lost his family to the culture of his nation, and his tragedy was that he was part of the violence that ultimately took his son from him. Azula is also part of that violence (though in a minor way since she’s a literal teen) and her partaking in that violence (Ba Sing Se, turning on her brother in the Boiling Rock) is likewise how she loses her connections too. Then, instead of Iroh, she just dives deeper instead of taking a step back and reflecting on how it happened. Meanwhile Hama had ALL OF THAT violence inflected on her. It wasn’t that she lost everything to her culture, it was that she lost her ENTIRE culture, and then at the end of her episode the one connection she might have made (Katara and Sokka) are taken away from her too. It’s not that “Hama shows no remorse” it’s that “Hama was WRITTEN as a monster who rose from violence”, and THAT is what people are going :/ about. It’s fundamentally a difference between looking at the characters in the show as presented, and looking at the choices the WRITERS made. In the show yes Hama was terrible, and she was taking her pain out on people who didn’t deserve it. But what op is asking is “why was Hama written that way?” which is a fair question.
Exactly.
TL;DR for those who still don’t get it: The issue is not the character; it’s the writing.
I’m in the middle of writing a much longer thing about this, but for now:
For me, she’s an illustration of the fact that suffering only creates more suffering. It doesn’t, contrary to the myth so pervasive in countries rooted in Christian hegemony, like here in the US, make people better or kinder or more virtuous. And people who suffer, who are tortured and abused, are not, automatically and by virtue of that suffering alone, Good and Virtuous.
It’s important for kids to understand that. Having been victimized doesn’t make you Virtuous. And on the flip side, that you’re not Perfectly Virtuous and Innocent doesn’t mean that what’s been done to you is okay, or that it doesn’t matter, or that you deserved it, or that you don’t deserve justice. These are two sides of the same coin, and both are so important.
We know from real history that being caged by oppressive fascist regimes in prison camps changes people, makes them cruel or numb or selfish or any number of unpleasant, unattractive things. And given that Hama is in hiding in the Fire Nation, and can’t seek the healing and solace she needs after escaping, it isn’t unreasonable or unrealistic that those changes stick when they otherwise might not have.
This doesn’t change the iffy territory the writing for Hama exists in.
The simple fact of the matter is that Bryke are white American dudes who don’t have the same personal or familial connection to the oppression of indigenous peoples that indigenous writers would have, and that is reflected in the way they chose to write Hama.
No has claimed that it’s acceptable to harm innocent people if you’re oppressed badly enough. That is a gross and deeply uncharitable distortion of what OP and others have been saying. The point that OP and others have been making, repeatedly, is that the decision to create a crazed, vengeful indigenous character who targets innocent people for harm because of personal and collective trauma comes with baggage that the writers probably weren’t aware of.
If you look at the history of BIPOC, although there are plenty of BIPOC individuals who were embittered by what was done to them and their people, but relatively few sought violent retribution against random civilians over it. Way more often than not, the anger and bitterness that is not channeled into healthy outlets is redirected inward, toward the self or toward other vulnerable people within the community. This is stuff that BIPOC activists and community leaders have been talking about for decades, centuries even.
What Hama does to Fire Nation civilians is what white people are afraid of BIPOC doing to them, not what BIPOC actually do for the most part. For decades, BIPOC activists have repeatedly said that BIPOC want equality and justice, not revenge. Creating a BIPOC character who is defined by her thirst for vengeance, especially for a show as popular as ATLA, perpetuates a narrative that BIPOC seeking revenge against innocent people is a genuine danger posed by those who have the nerve to be angry about the harm done to them and their communities in the name of the real-world equivalent to the Fire Nation’s “Great March of Civilization.”
No one has claimed that Bryke are Klansmen who gleefully create racist narratives. But they do have blind spots, and it does influence their narrative choices. This is one of them.
